Addendum: Hat tips to reader Artur for identifying the photographer, and to The Dour Salmon for noting that this tableau vivant "skull" was incorporated into publicity posters for The Silence of the Lambs:

Over a period of several years I incorporated into some of my lectures a discussion of the "blood eagle" maneuver supposedly devised by the Vikings. Now a Smithsonian article says that this (in)famous ritual is probably apocryphal:

One does not have to search too far in the secondary sources to uncover explicit descriptions of what execution by the blood eagle entailed. At its most elaborate... the ritual involved several distinct stages. First the intended victim would be restrained, face down; next, the shape of an eagle with outstretched wings would be cut into his back. After that...(continued below the fold)...

27 March 2013

This is a close-up of the hood ornament of a 1952 Pontiac Chieftain automobile. This car was at the Gilmore Car Museum for a car show. I used my 70-300mm (2x crop factor) lens and a small aperture to make sure the background was blurred out. Processing was minimal, although I tried to bring out the head and downplay the color of the car itself.

The sight that greeted the geologists as they entered the cabin was
like something from the middle ages. Jerry-built from whatever materials
came to hand, the dwelling was not much more than a burrow—"a low,
soot-blackened log kennel that was as cold as a cellar," with a floor
consisting of potato peel and pine-nut shells. Looking around in the dim
light, the visitors saw that it consisted of a single room. It was
cramped, musty and indescribably filthy, propped up by sagging
joists—and, astonishingly, home to a family of five:

The silence was suddenly broken by sobs and lamentations. Only
then did we see the silhouettes of two women. One was in hysterics,
praying: 'This is for our sins, our sins.' The other, keeping behind a
post... sank slowly to the floor. The light from the little window fell
on her wide, terrified eyes, and we realized we had to get out of there
as quickly as possible.

...The daughters spoke a language distorted by a lifetime of isolation.
"When the sisters talked to each other, it sounded like a slow, blurred
cooing."

Slowly, over several visits, the full story of the family emerged. The old man's name was Karp Lykov, and he was an Old Believer—a member of a fundamentalist Russian Orthodox sect, worshiping in a style unchanged since the 17th century...

Isolation made survival in the wilderness close to impossible. Dependent
solely on their own resources, the Lykovs struggled to replace the few
things they had brought into the taiga with them. They fashioned
birch-bark galoshes in place of shoes. Clothes were patched and
repatched until they fell apart, then replaced with hemp cloth grown
from seed...

...they had no technology for replacing metal. A couple of kettles served
them well for many years, but when rust finally overcame them, the only
replacements they could fashion came from birch bark. Since these could
not be placed in a fire, it became far harder to cook. By the time the
Lykovs were discovered, their staple diet was potato patties mixed with
ground rye and hemp seeds...

Lacking guns and even bows, they could hunt only by digging traps or
pursuing prey across the mountains until the animals collapsed from
exhaustion. Dmitry built up astonishing endurance, and could hunt
barefoot in winter, sometimes returning to the hut after several days,
having slept in the open in 40 degrees of frost, a young elk across his
shoulders...

The rest of the family were saved by what they regarded as a miracle: a
single grain of rye sprouted in their pea patch. The Lykovs put up a
fence around the shoot and guarded it zealously night and day to keep
off mice and squirrels. At harvest time, the solitary spike yielded 18
grains, and from this they painstakingly rebuilt their rye crop.

I'll stop here; it's not fair to excerpt more from the Smithsonian article. Several comments. First, it is possible for humans to run down wild animals, including antelope, because the muscles and cardiovascular systems of the latter are built for sprinting, but not for endurance. Secondly, the way to boil water in the absence of metal is to heat rocks in a fire and then dump them into the water in a wooden vessel (fire-cracked rock is a familiar archaeological find at ancient campsites).

A video documentary about this remarkable family (in Russian, and unfortunately unembeddable) is at these links: Part One. Part Two. Part Three.

Update March 2013: This afternoon I received the following email from the staff at VICE:

VICE is releasing a beautiful new documentary called Agafia's Taiga
Life that follows a family of Russian Old Believers who journeyed deep
into Siberia's vast taiga to escape persecution and protect in 1963.

We
are going to be holding a screening of the doc tomorrow, Thursday,
March 28th at NYC's historic Explorers Club. Reception at 6pm | 7pm
screening.

In Armenia, learning to play the grand game of strategy in school is
mandatory for children - the only country in the world that makes chess
compulsory - and the initiative has paid dividends. Armenia, a Caucasus
country with a population of just three million, is a chess powerhouse...

In 2011, Armenia made chess compulsory for second, third and
fourth-graders. That's why Susie and her classmates have two hours of
chess every week in school...

"Chess is having a good influence on their performance in other subjects
too. The kids are learning how to think, it's making them more
confident," said teacher Rosanna Putanyan, watching her pupils play from
the periphery...

"Chess develops various skills - leadership capacities, decision-making, strategic planning, logical thinking and responsibility," Ashotyan said. "We are building these traits in our youngsters. The future of the world depends on such creative leaders who have the capacity to make the right decisions, as well as the character to take responsibility for wrong decisions."

More than $3m has been spent on the project so far to supply chess equipment and learning aids in all Armenian schools, Ashotyan added. The majority of the budget was allocated to train chess players to become good teachers. In coming years, spending on chess is expected to rise, he said.

In the tradition of Carlton's Big Beer Ad, we invited our Facebook fans
to change the lyrics of the iconic opening chorus of Carmina Burana to
whatever they liked, and we would get the fabulous Sydney Philharmonia
Choirs to sing the winning entry. We received a huge number of entries
about a range of topics. Matthew Hodge's entry, an Ode to Sleep Deprived
Parents and was declared the winner!

The lyrics are brilliant, but I wish the recording hadn't suppressed the driving music, which is such a dramatic force. For reference, here is the original:

The counterfeiting of golf merchandise—clubs and balls, but also bags
and apparel—is a whopping business. A working group established to
fight counterfeiting nine years ago by the five biggest golf
manufacturers estimates that fake golf gear approaches 10% of the
legitimate market world-wide.

Big raids inside the U.S., like the one
in South Carolina, are rare, however, because 95% of the U.S.
counterfeit golf trade is online, with the products delivered directly
to individual consumers, according to the group...

From the exterior, the best counterfeit golf clubs these days can be
hard to differentiate from legitimate clubs. "These guys have become
very good at what they're doing," said Kerry Kabase, vice president of
purchasing for Edwin Watts Golf. The old telltale signs, such as
irregular paint and misshapen hosels, with glue oozing out, are less
common.
At a recent golf-industry show,
however, the U.S. working group displayed examples of counterfeit
clubheads sawed in half, and you can see the type of irregularities that
impact performance: irregular interior walls, or supposedly hollow
iron-head cavities that instead are solid steel. Performance is erratic.
Some fake clubs may play decently well for high-handicappers, others
less so. One common flaw is inconsistent performance among irons in a
set.

There are virtually no counterfeit
clubs or balls sold at authorized retail outlets in the U.S., the group
says. If you're shopping online, however, beware any club set whose
price seems too good to be true—especially if the order will be shipped
from China.

I think my Christmas present from a local store (a TaylorMade Burner Superfast driver) should be o.k. I'll find out as soon as this godforsaken snow melts...

A New York Times article describes how a Brazilian butterfly can manifest seven different wing patterns:

The gaudy brown Brazilian butterfly known as Heliconius numata has long
puzzled geneticists. It has seven different wing patterns, each of which
mimics that of a different local species of Melinaea, another group of
butterflies...

To help perfect their imitation of the seven Melinaea models, the
butterflies have somehow locked what should be a continuous range of
natural variation into seven specific patterns...

But how do the Heliconius butterflies pull off the trick of having seven
different forms in a single interbreeding population? Each wing pattern
is specified by many different genes, but since genes get shuffled in
each generation, the different wing patterns should quickly merge
together when parents with different wing patterns mate.

A team of French and British biologists, led by Mathieu Joron of the
National Museum of Natural History in Paris, has discovered the
butterfly’s solution. It has locked together in a supergene a cluster of
18 genes involved in specifying the wing pattern. The supergene is
inherited as a single unit, the biologists report in the current issue of Nature.

The woman is visible from thousands of miles away on a hacker's
computer. The hacker has infected her machine with a remote
administration tool (RAT) that gives him access to the woman's screen,
to her webcam, to her files, to her microphone. He watches her and the
baby through a small control window open on his Windows PC, then he
decides to have a little fun. He enters a series of shock and
pornographic websites and watches them appear on the woman's computer.

The woman is startled. "Did it scare you?" she asks someone off
camera. A young man steps into the webcam frame. "Yes," he says. Both
stare at the computer in horrified fascination. A picture of old naked
men appears in their Web browser, then vanishes as a McAfee security
product blocks a "dangerous site."...

"Man I feel dirty looking at these pics," wrote one forum poster at Hack Forums,
one of the top "aboveground" hacking discussion sites on the Internet
(it now has more than 23 million total posts). The poster was
referencing a 134+ page thread filled with the images of female "slaves"
surreptitiously snapped by hackers using the women's own webcams. "Poor
people think they are alone in their private homes, but have no idea
they are the laughing stock on HackForums," he continued. "It would be
funny if one of these slaves venture into learning how to hack and comes
across this thread."

Whether this would in fact be "funny" is unlikely. RAT operators have
nearly complete control over the computers they infect; they can (and
do) browse people's private pictures in search of erotic images to share
with each other online. They even have strategies for watching where
women store the photos most likely to be compromising...

Welcome to the weird world of the ratters. They operate quite openly
online, sharing the best techniques for picking up new female slaves
(and avoiding that most unwanted of creatures, "old perverted men") in
public forums. Even when their activities trip a victim's webcam light
and the unsettled victim reaches forward to put a piece of tape over the
webcam, the basic attitude is humorous—Ha! You got us! On to the next
slave!..

Today, a cottage industry exists to build sophisticated RAT tools with
names like DarkComet and BlackShades and to install and administer them
on dozens or even hundreds of remote computers. When anti-malware
vendors began to detect and clean these programs from infected
computers, the RAT community built "crypters" to disguise the target
code further. Today, serious ratters seek software that is currently
"FUD"—fully undetectable...

Butterfly researchers are gathering in Auckland next month to figure
out what has happened to the population of native butterflies usually
seen en masse nationwide.

"We've heard from many monarch lovers in
Canterbury and Otago that the monarchs haven't returned this summer -
and it's something that's got us baffled," says Jacqui Knight, secretary
of the Monarch Butterfly NZ Trust...

New Zealanders are concerned, she says, as they hold the notoriously social and graceful insect close to their hearts. "We love the monarch, and who wouldn't? It's a wonderful, beautiful insect and one we really need to look after."

While
the population was likely to bounce back next year, experts say the
anecdotal decline could be an indicator that times are tough for other
insects in the food chain. "Monarchs are an indicator species,
telling us a lot about how other insects are going, and this is
something to watch closely as we need our insects."

In 2011, the
wealthiest Americans—those with earnings in the top
20 percent—contributed on average 1.3 percent of their income to
charity. By comparison, Americans at the base of the income
pyramid—those in the bottom 20 percent—donated 3.2 percent of their
income. The relative generosity of lower-income Americans is accentuated
by the fact that, unlike middle-class and wealthy donors, most of them
cannot take advantage of the charitable tax deduction, because they do
not itemize deductions on their income-tax returns...

But the researchers also found something else: differences in behavior
among wealthy households, depending on the type of neighborhood they
lived in. Wealthy people who lived in homogeneously affluent areas—areas
where more than 40 percent of households earned at least $200,000 a
year—were less generous than comparably wealthy people who lived in more
socioeconomically diverse surroundings. It seems that insulation from
people in need may dampen the charitable impulse.

Wealth affects not only how much money is given but to whom it is given.
The poor tend to give to religious organizations and social-service
charities, while the wealthy prefer to support colleges and
universities, arts organizations, and museums. Of the 50 largest
individual gifts to public charities in 2012, 34 went to educational
institutions, the vast majority of them colleges and universities, like
Harvard, Columbia, and Berkeley, that cater to the nation’s and the
world’s elite. Museums and arts organizations such as the Metropolitan
Museum of Art received nine of these major gifts, with the remaining
donations spread among medical facilities and fashionable charities like
the Central Park Conservancy. Not a single one of them went to a
social-service organization or to a charity that principally serves the
poor and the dispossessed. More gifts in this group went to elite prep
schools... than to any
of our nation’s largest social-service organizations, including United
Way, the Salvation Army, and Feeding America (which got, among them,
zero).

Panther Cave is a rock shelter in Seminole Canyon State Park,
Texas, named for a dramatic leaping cat that is the largest of its many
pictographs. Copious overpainting indicates the site was used as a
canvas by generations of rock painters. Cats, humans wearing
headdresses, abstract figures from six inches to more than 10 feet high
decorate the rock face.

The images are predominantly in the Pecos River and Red Linear styles
and date back about 4,000 years. Pecos River Style is the oldest,
starting around 5000 years ago. Its iconography features monumental
polychrome designs of zoomorphic figures and of anthropomorphic figures
called shamans. Pecos River art is thought to have had ritual
significance, perhaps having been painted for ceremonial religious
purposes. Red Linear style is characterized by small red stick figures
engaged in a variety of shared activities like hunting, fighting, sex
and childbirth. Red Linear figures often incorporated the older large
Pecos River animal figures in their scenes...

The [British]government is considering whether to propose legal changes that
would allow radical new treatments for families at risk of incurable
genetic diseases that involve the creation of so-called "three-person
embryos".

A national consultation
released on Wednesday by the UK's fertility watchdog found public
support for techniques that involve introducing DNA from a third person
to embryos which could prevent mothers from passing on devastating
diseases, such as muscular dystrophy, to their children.

If
ministers and MPs give the procedures the green light, Britain would
become the first country to offer treatments that lead to children being
born with DNA from three people: their parents and a woman donor. The
amount of DNA from the donor is tiny compared with the parents...

Scientists have developed two techniques to prevent faulty mitochondria being passed on to children. Known as maternal spindle transfer and pronuclear transfer, they both involve transferring the genetic material from the parents into an egg donated by a healthy woman.

The treatment is controversial on several grounds, not least that the genetic modifications in the embryo pass down to all future generations. The techniques have never been tried in humans, but have worked in animal studies.

- and a note that "An Atlantic puffin (Fratercula arctica) shows off its tongue, which is
specially adapted to allow it to carry many fish in its bill at one
time. Atlantic puffins typically carry about 10 fish in their bills at
one time, using their tongues to hold their catch against spines on
their palate."

Also of interest is that the male puffin sheds that colorful outer layer of its beak after the courting season is over:

The sheath has separated from the bill. Light passing through the thin covering makes it look yellowish gray.
The entire sheath has moved forward and downward, partly covering the nasal opening.

Dispense Labs plans to lease the machines to dispensaries so they can offer round-the-clock convenience to a customer base that's far more likely to do its pot shopping at night. The so-called Autospense will be placed behind a vending cage accessible — like the machines themselves — only with a valid registration card. Fingerprint authentication provides additional security, and closed-circuit cameras, locks, and strict record keeping are relied upon to prevent machine tampering.

The 1,000-year-old bowl was part of the opening session of Sotheby's fine Chinese ceramics and works of art auction on Tuesday. Sotheby's said it was sold to a London dealer for $2.225m, far above the pre-sale estimate of $200,000 to $300,000.

The
person who put the bowl up for auction bought it at a US "tag sale" or
garage sale in 2007 and had it displayed in the living room for several
years before becoming curious about its origins and having it examined.

Inspired by this story, I'm going to attend an estate auction this weekend. Seriously. Look at all this stuff.

Popol Vuh "is a corpus of mytho-historical narratives of the Post Classic K'iche' kingdom in Guatemala's western highlands." Popol Vuh's prominent features are its creation myth, its diluvian suggestion, its epic tales..., and its genealogies."

Chapters 1-3 contain Popol Vuh's creation myth...

"This is the first account, the first narrative. There was neither
man, nor animal, birds, fishes, crabs, trees, stones, caves, ravines,
grasses, nor forests; there was only the sky. The surface of the earth
had not appeared. There was only the calm sea and the great expanse of
the sky. There was nothing brought together, nothing which could make a
noise, nor anything which might move, or tremble, or could make noise in
the sky. There was nothing standing; only the calm water, the placid
sea, alone and tranquil. Nothing existed. There was only immobility and
silence in the darkness, in the night. Only the creator, the Maker, Tepeu,
Gucumatz, the Forefathers, were in the water surrounded with light.
[...] Then Tepeu and Gucumatz came together; then they conferred about
life and light, what they would do so that there would be light and
dawn, who it would be who would provide food and sustenance. Thus let it
be done! Let the emptiness be filled! Let the water recede and make a
void, let the earth appear and become solid; let it be done. Thus they
spoke. Let there be light, let there be dawn in the sky and on the
earth! There shall be neither glory nor grandeur in our creation and
formation until the human being is made, man is formed. [...] First the
earth was formed, the mountains and the valleys; the currents of water
were divided, the rivulets were running freely between the hills, and
the water was separated when the high mountains appeared. Thus was the
earth created, when it was formed by the Heart of Heaven, the Heart of
Earth, as they are called who first made it fruitful, when the sky was
in suspense, and the earth was submerged in the water."

Together, gods attempted to create living beings so that they may be
praised and venerated by their creation. Their first attempts (animals,
mud man, and wooden man) proved unsuccessful because they lacked speech,
souls, and intellect.

"This the Forefathers did, Tepeu and Gucumatz, as they were called.
After that they began to talk about the creation and the making of our
first mother and father; of yellow corn and of white corn they made
their flesh; of cornmeal dough they made the arms and the legs of man.
Only dough of corn meal went into the flesh of our first fathers, the
four men, who were created. [...] And as they had the appearance of men,
they were men; they talked, conversed, saw and heard, walked, grasped
things; they were good and handsome men, and their figure was the figure
of a man."

Brando was notorius for never learning his lines for movies. Like in
Superman, he read his lines off the babies diaper / costume because he
refused to read the script before hand.

"During his long monologue over the body of his wife, for example,
Brando's dramatic lifting of his eyes upward is not spontaneous dramatic
acting but a search for his next cue."

Brando always claimed that he wanted to say scripted lines as if they
were just occurring to him--eventually leading to him being fed lines
over an earpiece in Don Juan DeMarco. At least that was his official
reason. Maybe he just hated memorizing lines.

Somehow I always thought that professional actors had impressive memories that I would never be able to match. Now I realize, I could have been an actor. I coulda' been somebody...

I'm still time-limited until I get my taxes done, but will post a little each day just to clean up some of the backlog, because bookmarks seem to breed and multiply if you leave them in the folders too long.

18 March 2013

I need to stop blogging for about a week, and I want to leave this post on the top of the front page while I'm gone.

The Voyager spacecraft's "pale blue dot" image, and Carl Sagan's commentary upon it, have been the subject of many video tributes; the one embedded above is my favorite because of the juxtaposition of so many classic film clips accompanying the spoken text.

Voyager carries a golden "phonograph record" embedded with basic information about our solar system and human biology, which most people understand as an attempt to initiate contact with other, extraterrestrial, intelligent species. It's really nothing of the sort, because it didn't even exit the solar system until 2012, and after another 40,000 years it will still be 1.6 light-years from the nearest other star. So the artifacts on Voyager are best viewed as a time capsule of our current existence rather than a communication device.

Traversing cosmic distances requires faster speeds than can (currently) be achieved by physical objects. Which leads us to a consideration of radio transmissions. Here's the opening scene from the movie "Contact," which depicts radio signals from earth penetrating out into space:

I had to compress the image to stay within the limits of my bloghost, so I don't know if the embed above will be clickable to supersize. If not, you can view the original here in all its glory*. At the right bottom is a box, enlarged from the right center of the image, showing another "pale blue dot."

But this time, that blue dot is not Earth, as it is in the Sagan/Voyager story, but rather a representation of a sphere of a diameter of 200 light-years. That's the total distance that emissions from earth have traveled since our development of the technology.

I can't get this image out of my head. That little dot is the maximal extent of human influence in our galaxy - and there are over a hundred billion such galaxies in the known universe.

The human mind isn't capable of processing such realities. At least mine isn't.

Several years ago, in a post about the dangers of monoculture manifested as the "pistachio disaster," I offered this comment:

We and our neighbors became familiar with anthracnose when it spread
through our subdivision several years ago in the form of "apple scab" on
the beautiful (and popular) crabapple trees. The leaves developed
black lesions and fell early from the tree. If any of you notice
something similar with your apple/crabapple trees, be sure to call an
arborist, because although the tree can tolerate partial defoliation, if
it happens several years in a row, it can kill the tree.

The crabapple is one of the focal points of our front garden in the spring, when the floral display bursts into flame and it becomes abuzz with pollinating insects, and once again weeks later when the petal drop...

... makes us feel like emperors treading a victory path.

The "apple scab" seemed to end years ago after treatment of the tree and after we raked up and discarded all the infected fallen leaves. But... the arborist has been returning annually to retreat the tree with a "spring foliar spray" at $120 per year, and this year I've decided to withhold treatment in order to redirect the funds to other purposes. Any advice from those of you with experience in such matters? Can we just wait and leave the tree untreated and monitor it for the return of the apple scab, or is it latent and ready to devastate the tree again?

Followup 2017:
We stopped the annual treatments after I wrote that post in 2013. The tree thrived in 2014, 15, and 16. This year the apple scab returned. In mid-June we have a substantial leaf drop that will stress but not kill the tree (I see several in the neighborhood that are more severely affected, presumably in their second or third year of infection, and possibly where the spores came from that landed on our tree).

I contacted a different arborist this year. They will plan to inject our tree next spring, before leafout, with Tebuject (an injectable fungicide). Whether that will be longer-lasting and whether it needs to be repeated annually I do not know. Cost is $136 for a one-time rx.

16 March 2013

In case you missed it, here is the "Pop Tart gun" incident, as described by the Washington Post:

A 7-year-old Anne Arundel County boy was suspended for two days for
chewing a breakfast pastry into the shape of a gun and saying, “Bang,
bang”— an offense the school described as a threat to other students,
according to his family.

The pastry “gun” was a rectangular
strawberry-filled bar, akin to a Pop-Tart, that the second-grader had
tried to nibble into the shape of a mountain Friday morning, but then
found it looked more like a gun, said his father, William “B.J.” Welch.

Welch
said an assistant principal at Park Elementary School told him that his
son pointed the pastry at a classmate — though the child maintains he
pointed it at the ceiling...

Anne Arundel officials could not comment on the pastry incident
because of confidentiality laws, schools spokesman Bob Mosier said. He
did say, however, that a letter was sent home to families Friday and is posted on the school’s Web site.

In
the letter, Myrna Phillips, assistant principal at the school, informed
parents that a student “used food to make inappropriate gestures that
disrupted the class” but said no “physical threats” were made and no one
was harmed.

If children are troubled by the incident, Phillips
wrote, parents should “help them share their feelings.” In addition, a
counselor will be available to students, the letter said. “In general,
please remind them of the importance of making good choices,” she wrote.

I have expressed my own disdain for "zero tolerance" school policies on several occasions (here, here, here, or search the blog for "zero brains"), but an Illinois church (Grace-Gospel Fellowship church near Chicago) has taken it to the next level:

Kirkwood told Doug Giles of Clash Daily that Christians must stop being
apathetic and stand up and fight for our God-given rights...

“Each child who wanted to participate chewed a pop-tart into the
shape of a gun and the top four would win prizes; in this case a toy
gun,” Kirkwood told Giles. Clash Daily reported the following on the awesome prizes:

“Second runner up received a double barrel shot-gun that we nicknamed ‘The Biden,’ and when we presented it we made sure to say what ‘not’ to do with it in a real situation. The prize for runner up was a Navy Seal sniper rifle that we named ‘The Chris Kyle’ in honor of the American Sniper. We felt that it was appropriate,” added Kirkwood, “given the insulting way that this administration ignored the death of this American hero, yet had the crust to send a delegation to the memorial service for Hugo Chavez.”

What was the top award? Kirkwood smiled and noted, “You know, I stood in the toy aisle for a good half an hour to choose just the right one and it turned out to be the biggest Nerf gun that I could find, and the kicker – the box was marked ‘semi-auto’ and ‘high capacity,’ so we named that one ‘the Feinstein.’”

What was the general response to this rather unique worship service?
“Well one couple did walk out, though I was told it was for another
engagement, but overall the response was tremendous and we plan on doing
it every year … and next year the prizes will be even better. Our
Bible Boot Camp class (High School age) will be challenged to come up
with a 5 minute speech on the right to bear arms and the winner will
walk away with a Ruger 10/22,” said Kirkwood, “who knows, maybe by then
we’ll have sponsors.”

A bat that was clinging to space shuttle Discoverys external fuel tank
during the countdown to launch the STS-119 mission remained with the
spacecraft as it cleared the tower, analysts at NASAs Kennedy Space
Center concluded.

Based on images and video, a wildlife expert
who provides support to the center said the small creature was a free
tail bat that likely had a broken left wing and some problem with its
right shoulder or wrist. The animal likely perished quickly during
Discoverys climb into orbit...

Launch
controllers spotted the bat after it had clawed onto the foam of the
external tank as Discovery stood at Launch Pad 39A. The temperature
never dropped below 60 degrees at that part of the tank, and infrared
cameras showed that the bat was 70 degrees through launch.

The
final inspection team that surveys the outside of the shuttle and tank
for signs of ice buildup observed the small bat, hoping it would wake up
and fly away before the shuttle engines ignited...

15 March 2013

This staff was purchased by Frederick Horniman at the end of the 19th
century from another collector, J. Newton Moss. When they were first
displayed, one of these staffs was believed to have been used during
riots realting to Fenians or Chartists during the nineteenth century.

Constable staffs were used by a variety of police forces, including
constables for large cities, parish communities, universities, railway
police, prison guards, or dockyard companies. This staff (0.25) is from 1830-1837, and is decorated with the cipher 'WRIV', for William IV.

Staffs, or truncheons, were used by the police force for practical and
ceremonial purposes. They were both a weapon and a badge of office.
Constables did not begin wearing uniforms until 1829 or carrying warrant
cards until the 1880s; before this time, the staff indicated the
constable was acting under the authority of the crown by displaying the
royal crown and cipher on the staff. The crown and cipher were
standardised on constable staffs under William IV, but additional
decoration could be added. Staffs might also have displayed the royal
coat-of-arms, the coat-of-arms of the local town or village, and the
owner’s initials. The main manufacturer of police staffs was Hiatt and
Co. of Birmingham, but staffs were usually produced locally for small
towns or parishes. Because the quantity of decoration was based on
personal preference, constable staffs are often one-of-a-kind.

We have just announced on the Official Google Blog that we will soon retire Google Reader (the actual date is July 1, 2013).

We know Reader has a devoted following who will be very sad to see it go. We’re sad too.
There are two simple reasons for this: usage of Google Reader has declined, and as a company we’re pouring all of our energy into fewer products. We think that kind of focus will make for a better user experience.

To ensure a smooth transition, we’re providing a three-month sunset period so you have sufficient time to find an alternative feed-reading solution. If you want to retain your Reader data, including subscriptions, you can do so through Google Takeout.

There's some discussion of alternatives at Reddit. I think a lot of people access TYWKIWDBI via Google Reader; it will be interesting to see how the traffic changes over the next several months.

The buck was so odd that Nickel thought the buck’s rack was wrapped up in twine or something else.

“I thought there was stuff wrapped up in his rack. I could see that
he was fairly wide and had some mass, it just didn’t make sense. I
almost didn’t shoot him as I’d never seen anything like this before. I
couldn’t take it anymore and decided to shoot this thing,” reported
Nickel...

A cactus buck is a deer that has... cryptorchidism,
which results in velvet remaining on antlers and continuing to grow
throughout the year. The condition generally occurs to bucks that have
irregular testicles or have incurred testicular damage, which impacts
testosterone levels. Testosterone regulates antler growth and
development.

It is also their general practice to deliberate upon affairs of
weight when they are drunk; and then on the morrow, when they
are sober, the decision to which they came the night before is
put before them by the master of the house in which it was made;
and if it is then approved of, they act on it; if not, they set
it aside. Sometimes, however, they are sober at their first deliberation,
but in this case they always reconsider the matter under the influence
of wine.

I would have paid money to watch the Republican presidential candidates conduct their debates after each had downed a six-pack of beer or four shots of bourbon. And I wish Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama had been required to smoke weed before stepping up to the podium.

Rob Rhinehart – a 24-year-old software engineer - ...found himself resenting the inordinate amount time it takes to fry
an egg in the morning and decided something had to be done. Simplifying
food... Rob has come up with
an odourless, beige cocktail that he calls Soylent...

Soylent contains all of the nutritive components of a
balanced diet, but with just a third of the calories and none of the
toxins or cancer-causing stuff...

"Everything the body needs – that we know of, anyway – vitamins, minerals
and macronutrients like essential amino acids, carbohydrates and fat.
For the fat, I just use olive oil and add fish oil. The carbs are an
oligosaccharide, which is like sugar, but the molecules are longer,
meaning it takes longer to metabolise and gives you a steady flow of
energy for a longer period of time, rather than a sugar rush from
something like fructose or table sugar...

I think it's possible to use technology to make healthy food very
cheap and easy, but we'll have to give up many traditional foodstuffs
like fresh fruits and veggies, which are incompatible with food
processing and scale.

I don't think we need fruits and veggies, though – we need vitamins and
minerals. We need carbs, not bread. Amino acids, not milk. It's still
fine to eat these whenever you want, but not everyone can afford them or
has the desire to eat them. Food should be optimised and personalised.
If Soylent was as cheap and easy to obtain as a cup of coffee, I think
people would be much healthier and healthcare costs would be lower. And I
think this is entirely possible."

With the help of a friend, she called Poison Control and was advised
to go to the nearest hospital that had scorpion antivenom, Chandler
Regional Medical Center. At the hospital, an emergency room doctor told
her about the antivenom, called Anascorp, that could quickly relieve her
symptoms. Edmonds said the physician never talked with her about the
cost of the drug or treatment alternatives.

Her symptoms subsided after she received two doses of the drug
Anascorp through an IV, and she was discharged from the hospital in
about three hours.

Weeks later, she received a bill for $83,046 from Chandler Regional
Medical Center. The hospital, owned by Dignity Health, charged her
$39,652 per dose of Anascorp.

The Arizona Republic reported last year about the pricey
markup Arizona hospitals were charging for the antivenom made in Mexico.
Pharmacies in Mexico charge about $100 per dose.

After the Food and Drug Administration approved the drug last year,
Tennessee-based Rare Disease Therapeutics sold the drug to a distributor
for $3,500 per dose. The distributor charged hospitals about $3,780 per
dose.

The Republic polled several hospitals in November, finding
that hospital charges for the serum ranged from $7,900 to $12,467 per
vial. At the time, Chandler Regional declined to tell The Republic how much it charged for Anascorp.

Edmonds' insurer, Humana, has paid Chandler Regional $57,509 for the
bill. The hospital has asked Edmonds for the balance of $25,537.

Costs are passed through the system, no questions asked. It make you want to scream. God, I am so tired of reading stories like this. Where is the adult supervision?

I drove myself to the ER
and spent 40 minutes sitting in an exam room. I spoke to a Physician's
assistant who called an Orthopedist to see if there was anything they
could do for me. No tests were done aside from the PA touching my leg
for a minute or two. I was given crutches ($59) and a prescription for
painkillers.

The bill I was sent was for $2800.

If you think there isn't something wrong then you're a fucking retard.

13 March 2013

Russian photographer Andrew Osokin is a master of winter macro photography. His photo collection
is chock full of gorgeous super-close-up photographs of insects,
flowers, snow, and frost. Among his most impressive shots are
photographs of individual snowflakes that have fallen upon the ground
and are in the process of melting away. The shots are so detailed and so
perfectly framed that you might suspect them of being
computer-generated fabrications.

On 29 December 2012, a fireball lit up the early evening skies over
the Sri Lankan province of Polonnaruwa. Hot, sparkling fragments of the
fireball rained down across the countryside... officials
forwarded the samples to a team of astrobiologists at Cardiff University
in the UK for further analysis.

The results of these tests, which
the Cardiff team reveal today, are extraordinary. They say the stones
contain fossilised biological structures fused into the rock matrix and
that their tests clearly rule out the possibility of terrestrial
contamination...

The most startling claims, however, are based on electron microscope
images of structures within the stones. Wallis and co. say
that one image shows a complex, thick-walled, carbon-rich microfossil
about 100 micrometres across that bares [sic] similarities with a group of
largely extinct marine dinoflagellate algae.

They say another
image shows well-preserved flagella that are 2 micrometres in diameter
and 100 micrometres long. By terrestrial standards, that’s extremely
long and thin, which Wallis and co. interpret as evidence of formation
in a low-gravity, low-pressure environment.

Claims similar to this have been made before; it will be interesting to see how this one pans out. Panspermia explained.

WASHINGTON — At a time when $46 billion in mandatory budget cuts are
causing anxiety at the Pentagon, administration officials see one
potential benefit: there may be an opening to argue for deep reductions
in programs long in President Obama’s sights, and long resisted by Congress.

On the list are not only base closings but also an additional reduction in deployed nuclear weapons
and stockpiles and a restructuring of the military medical insurance
program that costs more than America spends on all of its diplomacy and
foreign aid around the world. Also being considered is yet another
scaling back in next-generation warplanes, starting with the F-35, the most expensive weapons program in United States history.

None of those programs would go away. But inside the Pentagon, even some
senior officers are saying that the reductions, if done smartly, could
easily exceed those mandated by sequestration, as the cuts are called,
and leave room for the areas where the administration believes more
money will be required. These include building drones, developing offensive and defensive
cyberweapons and focusing on Special Operations forces...

But today, deficit hawks outnumber defense hawks on Capitol Hill, and
the possibility of $100 billion or more in additional annual cuts does
not seem outrageous — if only agreement were possible on which programs
should shrink fastest.

Last week, a group of five former deputy defense secretaries —
essentially the Pentagon’s chief operating officers — called for a
“bottom up” review that reassesses the need for each major program and
weapons system, saying this was an opportunity to accomplish cuts that
have long been delayed, after a decade in which the American national
security budget has nearly doubled.

In their more candid moments — almost always when speaking with a
guarantee of anonymity — the Pentagon’s top civilian and military
leaders acknowledge that the painful sequestration process may
ultimately prove beneficial if it forces the Defense Department and
Congress to reconsider the cost of cold-war-era systems that are still
in inventory despite the many changes made to the military in the last
10 years.

Melissamakeupx ("Multiple award winning makeup artist to the stars") has posted an instagram gallery of hundreds of photos of movie stars (most of them reportedly in the porn industry), showing actors before and after makeup. Via Buzzfeed, which appended data on age and the number of titles the actress has performed in. (Above: Ash Hollywood, age 23, 111 titles).

What percentage of Americans watches cable news for 10 minutes or
more per day? Only about 10-15%, if you simply add up the audiences for
Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC.

This is based on calculations
by political scientist Markus Prior, drawing on detailed data about
what people actually watch and not what they report in a survey. Survey
reports of news consumption are often highly inaccurate. Consider this comparison of a 2008 Pew survey to data on viewership from the Nielsen Company [above].

In the survey, almost a third of Americans believe they watch one of the
three cable networks “regularly.” It’s not quite clear what
“regularly” means, of course. This is one of the problems of using
survey questions to measure media exposure. But if we assume that a
regular viewer should watch at least an hour per week, then in reality
only about 6-7% of Americas meet that description.

Hmmm. Now please someone compare those data with the number who watch "The Daily Show" at least an hour per week.

11 March 2013

The man sleeping on the couch has the face of Adolph Hitler (in the body and clothing of the evil ruler Zahhāk, from Ferdowsi’s Shahname, the Book of Kings, the Persian national epic). The two snakes on his shoulders are Mussolini and Tojo. He is dreaming about three kings who are coming to kill him: Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt.

This miniature (part of a larger series) was created by a British graphic designer; he incorporated traditional Persian art, literature, and iconography in an effort to appeal to the people of Iran to support the "three kings" in their opposition to Germany.

The British and Soviet forces invaded Iran from the north and south
between August 25 and September 8, 1941. The reason for the invasion was
that after the German offensive against the Soviet Union in June, they
felt threatened the Iranian petroleum resources in their management, and
they also intended to transmit war material from the Persian Gulf via
rail to the Soviet Union. Although Iran was neutral, the Shah had
basically done the inter-war modernization of the country with German
help, and he refused to expel the German advisors on British request.
After the peace treaty the British deposed him and expelled him to
Egypt, and raised on the throne his son Reza Pahlavi, who represented
the Anglo-American policy, and declared war on Germany. Subsequently, in
November 1943 opened the Tehran conference with the participation of
the three above kings, with the aim of coordinating the common war
efforts and to open the second, western front.

The easy defeat of the Persian army and the humiliation of the
occupation hit very hard the country’s public opinion. This was
acerbated by the fact that the massive British buying-up of food for the
troops caused a severe famine in the occupied zone, and that, on the
principle of “divide and conquer”, both occupying forces excited the
ethnic minorities living under their power against the Persian rule. All
this is described in detail in Simin Daneshvar’s Savushun (1969), the key novel of 20th-century Iran.

It is understandable therefore, that on the occasion of the Tehran
conference the British saw it opportune to present the purpose of their
arrival in an easily perceptible visual form to the Persian people...

I suspect few Americans are knowledgeable about this aspect of the second World War. Additional historical context and the other images in the series, are presented at Poemas del rio Wang.

This video was posted at New Scientist, which offers a prize to the first person who can correctly explain how the illusion is created.

Courtesy of neuroscientist Al Seckel,
the video is free of editing effects or computer-generated imagery.
"There is one train; it is as long as you see," he says. The illusion,
presented in his newly published digital book that delves into the science of the world's best illusions, continues to fool Nobel laureates and other great minds when presented at conferences.

As more classes go digital, wireless access is no longer confined to brick buildings but is spreading to school buses.

Forget snoozing or socializing. En route to
athletic games or other events, Chaska and Chanhassen students can now
do their homework online, upload photos from field trips and read Web
articles from their bus seats. Their school district, Eastern Carver
County, is the first in the Twin Cities and second in the state to bring
Wi-Fi to buses, joining a trend nationwide of turning raucous rides
into quiet study time.

“It’s the future,” said transportation coordinator John Thomas.

This month, the west-metro school district
finished outfitting 25 buses with the technology and plans to expand it
to all 110 buses so kids — some of whom have 45-minute rides from rural
homes — can also connect...

The 25 Wi-Fi buses are in use every day by the two high schools and
three middle schools, he added. It cost about $13,000 to start up the
technology and there will be about $5,000 a year in service fees from
the district’s $4 million transportation budget. While Chaska schools mostly use the Wi-Fi buses
for activities, the Bemidji buses are used more on daily routes, which
can average an hour each way in the sprawling district.

Who else benefits from the technology?

“The bus drivers have said it’s been some of the quietest trips they’ve been on,” Thomas said.

"Tai-wiki-widbee" is an eclectic mix of trivialities, ephemera, curiosities, and exotica with a smattering of current events, social commentary, science, history, English language and literature, videos, and humor. We try to be the cyberequivalent of a Victorian cabinet of curiosities.

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I'm using an old photo of my grandfather as an avatar; he would have been amused.
Old friends, classmates, students, former colleagues, or distant relatives are welcome to email me via retag4726 (at) mypacks.net